116 ON CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 



looked like delicate and beautiful flowers each having 

 eight petals. It was true that these "flowers" could 

 protrude and retract themselves, but their motions 

 were hardly more extensive, or more varied, than those 

 of the leaves of the sensitive plant; and therefore they 

 could not be held to militate against the conclusion so 

 strongly suggested by their form and their grouping 

 upon the branches of a tree-like structure. 



Twenty years later, a pupil of Marsigli, the young 

 Marseilles physician, Peyssonel, conceived the desire 

 to study these singular sea-plants, and was sent by the 

 French Government on a mission to the Mediterranean 

 for that purpose. The pupil undertook the investiga- 

 tion full of confidence in the ideas of his master, but 

 being able to see and think for himself, he soon dis- 

 covered that those ideas by no means altogether corre- 

 sponded with reality. In an essay entitled " Traite du 

 Corail," which was communicated to the French Acad- 

 emy of Science, but which has never been published, 

 Peyssonel writes : 



" Je fis fleurir le corail dans des vases pleins d'eau de 

 mer, et j'observai que ce que nous croyons etre la fleur 

 de cette pretendue plante n'etait au vrai, qu'un insecte 

 semblable a une petite Ortie ou Poulpe. J'avais le 

 plaisir de voir remuer les pattes, ou pieds, de cette 

 Ortie, et ayant mis le vase plein d'eau ou le corail etait 

 a une douce chaleur aupres du feu, tous les petits in- 

 sectes s'epanouirent. L'Ortie sortie etend les pieds, 

 et forme ce que M. de Marsigli et moi avions pris pour 

 les petales de la fleur. Le calice de cette pretendue fleur 

 est le corps meme de 1'animal avance et sorti hors de la 

 cellule." 



1 This extract from Peyssonel's manuscript is given by M. Lacaze 

 Duthiers in his valuable Hiatoire Naturelle du Corail (1866). 



